In the packaging industry, the manufacture of folding boxes traditionally takes place in line, by folding and gluing blanks using a folder-gluer. Since the folding boxes are ultimately delivered in shingle form, they are generally packaged in the form of packs directly at the outfeed from the folder-gluer. Very often, these packs are also subjected to individual strapping with the intention of ensuring their stability, thereby facilitating their handling and/or their storage.
In order to perform such packing operations, the use of a particular type of packaging machine, namely a packing machine, is known. The latter is, in fact, capable not only of placing the folding boxes in packs, but also of binding together the folding boxes making up each pack.
Of the packing machines known from the prior art, it is possible to distinguish those which operate broadly in three stages. The machine starts by counting the boxes one by one, to enable separating them on a regular basis as soon as a precise number is reached, thereby creating a succession of batches of boxes. The machine then places them in packs, which involves stacking a reduced number of batches, generally two, in a more or less complicated manner. The packing is completed by strapping, in which the boxes of each pack are secured together by one or a plurality of ties. The strapped packs may then be palletized conveniently for handling and/or storage.
A combination of a folder-gluer and a packing machine has a disadvantage, of interfering with quality control, particularly for finished products. The nature of interlinking between these two types of machine is such that the possibility of collecting samples of finished products easily is in reality only available at the outfeed from the packing machine. Unfortunately, such an operation requires intervention of an operator, who must intervene manually in order to collect a pack and must then break each tie holding the boxes together, before extracting one or a plurality of samples from the stack. The operator is then also required to recycle the opened pack by topping it up, before strapping the pack again and then placing it back in circulation.